Notes
2016—Images, words, and fragments kept in time.
Images, words, and fragments kept in time.
Once I cut my hair, it really felt like there was no turning back.
It wasn’t so much sadness as the feeling that I was slowly being forgotten by family and friends.
It was my first night watch. The night air was good. No one passed by. Only insects and a single cat wandered around me.
Even things I know well seem to scatter in my head the moment I stand in front of them.
The military may take my youth, but it cannot take the course of my life.
If there’s one good habit I picked up in the military, it was finding joy in writing.
Looking at the many small lights of the harbor in the cold wind, I find myself smiling.
The word “Thursday” reminds me every week that the days are long, but the weeks are short.
Maybe because I don’t write in my diary when we’re not underway, it seems like I only ever write when we’re out at sea.
From far away, a wave is just a small blue dot moving.
Like a ball bouncing between two plates, the more times it bounces (the more balls there are), the contacts between the plates increase exponentially. Could our lives be something like this? […] Could those first contacts have multiplied enormously, giving rise to all of this— letting us see things and talk to one another?
Right now, the gears won’t turn without it. What do I really want?
Time is passing quickly in this unit, which has been a really good place for me to grow.
If dreams that cannot come true in the real world could come true in a virtual world so identical that we wouldn’t even know the difference, who would choose to remain in reality? […] No—what is reality?
I regret getting cocky without realizing I was only doing well because I kept solving problems I was already familiar with. I should go back to how I started, stay humble, and work harder.
This problem had come to feel like fate to me. I’d tried it more than five times and still couldn’t solve it. […] I finally broke that fate.
Since leaving the military last year, I’ve been slowly fixing the things that used to bother me.
It was the first day of classes. Attending class online made it finally sink in that I was really a university student.
Thinking about it, I don’t think the things I’ve immersed myself in have ever had much to do with the group I belonged to.
New situations always made me nervous, and afterward I was left feeling weighed down and disappointed in myself.
After spending the past few years reading only logical and rational books, I feel like my emotional side is fading away.
Why do people keep diaries? Even if you put a lot of thought into writing one, you forget about it a day later and probably never open it again.
Maybe I’m only seeing the good side because I’m traveling. I’m imagining a future here, and trying to figure out what might not be right for me.
It had been a long time since I’d felt that sense of being tired rise up from within.
Let’s fill the day with boring, quiet hobbies— meditation, reading, playing the piano, walks without music, and thinking deeply.
I’m growing my hair out. It feels like the longest I’ve ever had it, and since growing it out was getting uncomfortable, I got a perm.
Maybe because life has been so busy, even finding a small gap in the day hasn’t been easy.
Is it worth putting myself through a mentally exhausting semester just to find some romance in my final one?
Once a trip is halfway over, the rest always seems to disappear even faster.
I’ve always thought of Chopin’s piano pieces as some of my closest companions in life.
Of course, the first thing I cooked was spaghetti.
This is the life I imagined while I was in the navy, but the reality is quite different.
The water bottle I bought turned out to be faulty, and water leaked out around the lid, soaking the laptop and iPad in my bag.
Since my grandfather died, I feel like I’ve come to take life more seriously.
Now I can see it not as an emotion, but simply as an experience from the past.
It felt strange to exhibit my work for the first time, and I found myself looking forward to a life as an artist.
The days feel slow, but looking back, so much seems to have happened with such intensity. That’s the kind of contradictory life I’ve been living.