Category Archives: wasted keystrokes

a sorry attempt at writing something that sort of resembles stream of consciousness, but devoid of insight.

how the peter kang that i am no longer resembles the peter kang that i knew

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note: get ready for a double-dose of preaching and doodling

when something ends or is about to end, it only seems natural for me to do some sort of “recap” followed by some self-reflective commentary that is supposed to make me a better person… not that i buy into any of that anymore, but just because of habit, i’ll go ahead.

[list] how the peter kang that i am no longer resembles the peter kang that i knew

1. the extra-curricular commitments surpassed academic ones
by doing things like KSA, Res Programs, CampusPix, unsuccessfully running for student council, etc., my academic life took a backseat and i finally learned what it felt like to be “involved” in the college community. i guess some positive things i came away with were leadership skills, using email, functioning on minimal sleep, and handling pressure better.

2. being lonely does not mean being unhappy
i’ve fooled myself so many times this year into thinking that the “something’s missing” part of my life was the romance, the companion, the significant other. i drove myself to insecurity buying into this thought, and to a large degree, i still suffer from it. however, little by little, my awareness of this pathos is fighting away foolish urges to pursue random girls, stare for hours at my buddy list, and sit alone in my room in despair when nobody calls to hang out on a weekend night. i do think the disbanding of the lonely man club had a lot to do with my struggle, but i think it’s time for me to stop feeling sorry for myself. i need to remember also, that i have great friends here.

3. the deterioration of the body
i used to be a healthy, eating well and going to the gym several times a week. this year, such good routines went down the drain with my extra-curricular commitments sapping me of any desire to take care of myself. i stopped going to the gym, losing much of the muscle mass that i gained over the summer. i ate nasty foods during the late night, bumming off wook’s dining dollars at JJ’s or eating pinnacle at 3am on weeknights. my coffee habit compelled me to buy a coffeemaker which i used for all of three months before running back to starbucks for triple shot lattes. i smoked for the first time and several more times in social settings. i don’t sleep enough and i think my eye sight has drastically worsened. summer needs to be a recuperation period if i am to survive another year.

4. wanting to be a writer but knowing i am too unskilled/lazy
reading louis menand’s american studies, chang rae lee’s native speaker (aloft is on my shelf waiting its turn) and books such as A House for Mr. Biswas or Remains of the Day for british literature class has made me want to become a writer. i feel like i have a unique voice and a story to tell, but i would like to know how i can ever reach the level of writing required to put together something meaningful. i have a tough time grasping the intricacies of subtext, symbolism, allusions, and character development. all i can hope to do is read more and maybe my writing will show some sort of progress.

5. the loss of hope and the inevitability of career
i looked several years into my future and realized it would end up boring and meaningless. with no real goal in sight and no cause to embrace, the life i envision for myself, at least from my collected thoughts this year, is a series of social rituals that will deprive me of any individuality, although in my mind, i will convince myself that i am uniqe. i will find a job out of college and work there, making entry-level money. i will probably work there for a few years before realizing that i should have gone to law school right out of undergrad. i will probably go to law, or if i am bold, i will go to business school. since my grades were mediocre as an undergrad, i will have to attend a second-tier graduate school, and this will be shameful to me and my parents, who, as much as they deny their immigrant-minded ivy-preference, will wonder why their son’s professional course has been so disappointing. i will, of course, keep myself distracted through wild weekend nights at twenty-something hangout spots and maybe some sort of alumni involvement at columbia. my biggest worries will be paying rent and affording the wasteful lifestyle that i will acquire. i will probably remain single and even opt not to have a family. my sister will marry first and when she has her partially korean kid, the other half up for grabs, i will be the “cool” uncle who buys gifts and sneaks sips of champagne at family gatherings. in the meantime, after a JD or MBA, i will upgrade my career and make slightly above-average income. living alone will help me to maximize expenditure on myself, allowing me to buy an impressive wardrobe, especially in the shirt/tie department. my living quarters will be furnished with sensible contemporary urban taste and i will have membership at a fairly overpriced gym in my neighborhood where they let you do your office work in their lounge. by the time my hair starts to gray, i’ll have done what i can to help my parents be comfortable, and maybe i’ll have had a few side projects that have occupied my time, such as writing, a personal business, some viable investments, and a photo album of good times with friends from my post-college years. hoepfully i’ll have read a lot more books by then, have acquired a taste for more sophisticated magazines, and have traveled a bit more around the world. by the time it’s time for me to reconsider my career, either due to boredom or the glass ceiling, i’ll have had enough experience and capital to start up my own business/firm. i’ll pour my heart and passion into it, and succeed or fail, i’ll be satisfied with the feeling of having had my independence. barring a freakish, unexpected death, i hope to grow old enough to mature and write seriously. i will have a collection of writings that will chart my development over the decades, and by the time i’m ready to be published, i’ll know enough to be coherent and meaningful to a degree. when i die, none of these things will matter because their significance will go to the grave with me, but whatever it is that i’ve written in my book may or may not hit a chord with someone reading it one day. but then again, that’s just a vain thought and it may have to be through some cheesy publish-it-yourself services that i make available any copies of my book, in which case, disillusionment is very possible and death without any published works very likely. but having been a film major, perhaps i might have some sort of hand in making a motion picture that will allow me to derive a bit of satisfaction before death. i wonder if i will look back one day and ever think about the day i decided to write about my future and was totally wrong about it.

6. understanding that i don’t understand anything
in my time at columbia, i’ve read books by very intelligent people and i’ve been exposed to very important ideas. however, i’ve come to believe that i know jack about anything and that anything i do say is a bunch of BS and an attempt to sound interesting/smart/cool in order to impress my peers or to be viewed favorably by them. opinions and thoughts formed are usually all contingent on the latest thing i’ve read, and whoever gets read on the toilet becomes my god for that day. this practice of read and regurgitate with the conviction that i am being my own person and developing my own thoughts and ideas as a synthesis of my readings and life lessons is another self-serving mechanism. and this attempt to be overly critical on my weblog in order to inoculate myself from outside criticism is a cowardly, self-serving practice as well. then what? is anything acceptable? i can say that i realize that when we act, we do so out of self-interest, but that would be such a cop out and a testament to my reliance on primitive philosophical doctrines. the best way for me to handle this would be to say – i don’t know shit, but help me feel better about myself and talk to me.

i regret many things this year and it ranges from the way i’ve behaved with girls, the way i procrastinated so much for papers, the way i missed classes in chunks, the way i let my body fall apart, the way i became so insecure, the way i made myself feel so lonely and bitch to everyone about it. i think if anything, i learned that i have a lot of things to tweak and improve about myself, but even this notion of working towards a “better” version of myself shows how ingrained in the protestant tradition i am. i don’t think it’s “better” that i want, but perhaps to be able to look back one day and tell myself: i’ve learned some and tried to change a little.

i’ll probably regret writing this piece, but then again, it’s not as bad as some of my self-pity entries. cheers to self-criticism and great applause for short attention spans that will make a full reading of this entry near-impossible.

-pk

when you’re cool, you study in the stacks

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this edition of wasted keystrokes comes from the butler stacks, where i’ve been camped out (in) since 5pm today. it’s only been about 4 hours and i’ve actually gone back and forth to get food, coffee, fresh air, etc… i feel like it’s not so isolated in here at all, and i’ve seen several people walk by me looking for books in the PR or PQ sections, which is on the 10th floor and is where you can get english and film related books… there is a super long table here that i’ve been able to use for myself… i’ve written 2/10 pages for my history paper, nowhere near the pace of the progress chart i made for myself three hours ago… and i’ve also had one very weird dream while using my left arm as a pillow.

the dream.
i’m wearing a suit. don’t recall the colors. i ring the door bell of an apartment – a nice one. the door opens up. it’s paul tagliabue, the commissioner of the nfl. he’s only a few inches taller than me, prompting me to wonder – is he really 6-5 as they say he is? we shake hands and he says he’s pleased to meet me, but i am already feeling nervous because he makes $8.5 million a year and i want to be a lowly intern at his headquarter office. i don’t know why, but i ask him about his salary and he says something like – “nah, i actually make about $200,000 to $300,000 a year” which prompts me to make a football-wise remark, “oh, so i guess they just overload payment in your signing bonus, like the players do.” hehe, but he doesn’t really laugh. then he seems busy and tells me – “it was nice meeting you. we’ll do lunch sometime.” and i think to myself, “yeah right – i didn’t even get the internship yet.” and he waves goodbye, a way of telling me to get out of his place (it’s a spacious nyc apartment studio – lots of light coming in). i wake up.

it was too surreal of a dream that i had to rush to starbucks and hook myself up with a triple-shot cappuccino just for sanity’s sake. yeah. i’m feeling good. except i have 8 more pages to write. it sucks that the stacks close at 11pm. i had a thought walking outside – if i had a girlfriend that i really really liked, would we ever come to the stacks to study (each other*)? i recalled the near-love scene in atonement when robbie and cecilia get it on in the tallis family library before being walked-in on by briony… that was a hot scene and because i know the scent of books so well, it was easy for me to relate, at least smell-wise… yep.

i guess i should write this in my pulpit section, but i don’t really want to get into a full-blown monologue about it. i just wanted to make a statement on racism, and how it’s often more than some cowardly remarks about how a certain group or groups of people are inferior to another (and sometimes, people ought to realize when such remarks are satirical and when they are malicious). i think when it comes to racism, the element of power plays a key role as one group claims that it is entitled to something while denying another group because of their inferior race. wanna see racism? claude bowers, historian of the early 20th century, in quoting his Southern hero Benjamin Hill in Tragic Era (an old Dunning school Reconstruction era survey book) talks about the absurdity of “universal negro suffrage”: ‘Ignorance is more easily duped than intelligence, and … knaves have always been advocates of conferring power on fools; and so fools have generally thought knaves as their best friends.’ … and of such a remark, bowers writes “Hill reached the height of the controversial discussions of the ten-year period… there was art in the eloquence, erudition in the references, truth in the assertions, power in the logic.” in order to understand my poorly extracted lines, one must realize that Hill is equating blacks with fools and Radical Republicans with knaves. and Bowers gets on his knees and worships Hill. for someone who called Frederick Douglass “insolent” for urging President Andrew Johnson to support the 15th Amendment, bowers makes me really wonder – did he hate blacks or was his scholarly work merely reflecting the dominant attitudes of that time? maybe a bit of both… or a lot of both.

alrighty, back to carpetbaggin’… if my TA remains on strike, professor foner might actually read my paper himself! then again, that probably means a crappy grade. it’s like choosing between an inflated grade and a divine one…

-pk

* the above remark raised a self-awareness flag that came as a double-warning: i am being a cornball and a hornball – as in, thinking corny and horny thoughts at the same time? chornball? can some really be corny about being horny? ok, im not really horny, just lonely. come study with me.

sleepless… in seattle?

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it was raining again today, prompting me to invoke the cliche – april showers bring may flowers. this got me into wondering if the name ‘Mayflower’ was derived from associating flowers with the month of May, or perhaps Mayflower is the name of some sort of flower already in existence, but it would be because it blooms in May, right? all this Mayflowering got me curious about pilgrims and why they called their ship such a name (why not Jesus Boat or God’s Cruise?). but then i wondered about history and if my elementary-school knowledge of pilgrims was just one of those things that reflects my ignorance and acceptance of american propaganda myths (like pilgrims and indians got along and had an awesome thanksgiving dinner together).

i read part of a book for my history research paper today – charles bowers’s tragic era. it was an amusing experience because i had never really taken the time to look at historiographical works of the earlier 20th century (having been only exposed to post-revisionist or post-post-revisionist works of the last thirty years). it was striking how much, at least from my 21st century point of view, bowers interlaced his racial prejudices into the book while following all the methods and craft of a historian. casting the newly freedmen as “unwilling to work” and “lazy,” bowers even makes the argument that the Black Codes were “reasonable, objective” efforts to “restore order in the South.” the way he was so vivide about the “Congo crowd” and their inability to function without a subservient role in society definitely made me wonder about the process of writing history and all the prejudices of the time that go with it. it also helped me to see the malleability of primary sources. while walking home from the library, i thought what sort of prejudices pervaded our writings today and in what ways, many years from now, we would look on today’s works and raise eyebrows at the outdated ideas. i also wondered how a black person reading bowers’s book may have felt.

walking to work today in the rain, i was in a pleasant mood, almost to the point of enjoying the weather. i had my bright blue raincoat on to keep me dry, and listening to the constant tapping of the raindrops on my hood induced a pleasing sensation. i then wondered if it was like this all the time in seattle, because i heard it rains there often. and then i remembered someone telling me about seattle and how it has a coffee shop on every corner. while new york probably offers just as many or even more coffee shops, i actually took a few moments on my outdoor walk to imagine myself in seattle, perhaps working for microsoft. would i still read the new york times there, or would i have to settle for a lesser local paper? then i realized i could maybe work for starbucks at their corporate headquarters and never have to pay for coffee again. and it struck me that being “sleepless in seattle” may be due to overconsumption of caffeine, which the city is well known for. caffe skim latte for life.

i’m beginning to notice my own stench that fills my room. wook said it was a mixture of coffee beans and “man,” but i’m beginning to think it’s the pair of jeans i haven’t washed in four months. now, that’s pretty disgusting.

4-minute shower. some british lit. gonna bust a bag of dunkin donuts original flavor coffee beans. don’t want to miss french again.

-pk