In Continuum.

If you have a chance to sit down with any of my relatives to talk about me, you'd probably hear them mention just how much I liked to cry when I was younger. Or, I don't think I actually liked doing something like that, because I distinctively remember hating every situation that I was involved in while crying. There was a particularly incident that I remember, properly recorded with photographic evidence by my parents. There is a picture in the photo album that has me crying by the side of a bed in Taiwan with a toy train set by the side of my feet. For some reason, I remember that day very well, and nobody remembers why I was crying my eyeballs out, save for me. I remember trying to piece the tracks of the toy train set together on the wooden floor, but the plastic tracks kept scraping against the surface and making strange squeaking sounds. The tracks wouldn't stay still, and for some reason I didn't think that playing the train set on the bed with a proper surface would be a good solution. The worse alternate solution that my young innocent mind came up with was to cry my ass off and hope that somebody else would think of a better idea for me. No matter how cute you are, you'd want to throw me out of the window by this point.

I am starting to wonder why my parents thought that it'd be appropriate to take that picture of me crying like a baby. They probably thought it to be important to keep some kind of photographic evidence just so that I won't be able to deny everything when I grow older - like now. I can't deny it anyway, because I remember how I was as an annoying brat who cried every little detail. I am like an overly emotional child whose only reaction to anything that makes me unhappy was to cry it out. I do not deny the cathartic effect of crying at times, but I did it way too often that it eventually became a reason why my parents would need something cathartic in their lives. They probably took that photograph while thinking to themselves "just wait till you grow up". Now that I have grown up, I fully agreed that I deserved a kick and to be dragged into the bathroom or something like that. That'd probably traumatize me as a child, but then it would have shut me up for good. I wouldn't know what to do with the baby-version of myself other than to give me a good grip on the shoulders and some shaking. But, I think there is something good that came out of all the crying, similar to how something good comes out from everything bad. Of course, nobody saw the benefits in the short-run, but not a lot of people stuck around to see the effects in the long-run anyway.

As I grew older, I started to lose the ability to tear very often, and I don't know why. I tear so irregularly that I actually remember many specific moments when it happened in the past decade or so. They were all very specific instances that caused me to have very snappy tears. By "snappy", I mean that they came fast and they went away pretty soon as well. I have a nagging feeling that all the crying I did when I was younger probably caused my tear duct to kick into overdrive and, as a result, has been going through some kind of withdrawal symptom ever since my teenage years. It forgot how to tear, or has forgotten how to tear due to emotional reasons. Aside from the everyday necessity of tearing to moisturize the eyeballs, there are times when nothing comes even when I get that sour feeling in the nose. I do consider myself to be somewhat emotional, but then that does not mean that I tear easily. Being a fan of movies, there has only been a handful of films that ever made me tear, and we are not even talking about full-blown brawling here, but just a drop or two coming down my cheeks. Schindler's List comes to mind as one of such films, but then who can sit through that and be all ambivalent about it?

I used to be the kind of kid to throw a lot of temper around, and my mother used to threaten me that if I continued to be angry, a vein in my neck or forehead would burst, and I'd die. Come to think about it, I'm not sure if that was the truth or just a flat out lie, because of how she used to do it over and over again. My mother actually threatened me with death back in the days when I cried continuously, imagine that! But I think that worked, because I'd calm down almost immediately afterwards, though that isn't something that lasted very long back then. I used to fight with my sister a lot, and those were the times when I would cry afterwards because either my parents sided with her or I lost. Crying just seemed like the best solution out of anything, and I understand how it sounds like a very girly thing to do. Anyway, I suppose all the temper-throwing and all the tears amounted to me being who I am today. It isn't that I am emotional detached or anything, but because I think I am more emotionally equipped to handle a lot of things life decide to throw at me, you know. There are many ways in which I can deal with a particular situation right now, which makes me more ... mature I suppose? I hate to use that word in general, the word "mature". It is so difficult to say if someone has mature or not, as if it is some kind of fruit and that you can tell by the color. I suppose the word can only be used comparatively, and only when you are saying that you are either more or less mature than before. In that respect, I suppose I have changed a great deal.

It has got to do with a lot of things in life really, many different aspects of my life that contributed to this. In high school, with all the boys around, I suppose we were all conditioned to behave in a certain way and not behave in a certain way. Breaking those social norms also meant social suicide, where the other boys would pick on you for acting differently from everybody else. So I had to keep my emotions in, I had to box them all up, because we all know what happens when you throw your temper and you lose it in between classes. I remember that one year when I had Ambrose as my classmate, and someone thought that it'd be fun to mess with him because he was considered to be "bully-able" by the standards of other boys. I remember Matthew doing something to him in between classes that caused Ambrose to flare up, and I remember him throwing a table at somebody, which was something he did all the time. Then for some reason, his glasses broke in half, and he started screaming and crying on the floor about how he bought the glasses only a week earlier, and he had mucus all over his face. Instead of stopping, though, the boys just stood around and laughed harder, which must have caused quite a trauma in Ambrose. Speaking of which, I haven't seen that guy since high school graduation. I wonder how he is now.

In junior college, it was the same story with different characters. This time around, instead of getting yourself out of trouble, all the boys wanted to do was to control themselves and pretend that they are OK about things that they are not OK with. With girls as our classmates, we didn't want to "lost it", so to speak in front of the girls. It must have been an unspoken rule of some sort, one of the many things that the boys couldn't do in front of the girls. We wanted to seem tough, we wanted to see indifferent, and we wanted them to like us. It is stupid, I know, but it's not like it stopped the boys from wanting to act in a certain way. I mean, the boys from the sports teams were always looked upon as being the cream of the crop because they were the "epitome of manhood" at those times. Just imagine, muscular dragonboat boys with their oars, that'd get any girls at that age to fall head over heels. And for the rest of us that are not nearly as physically inclined, we wanted to show and present ourselves in a different light. Being vulnerable, or being open with our emotions, those just didn't really seem like a viable option for most of us. So we opted to keep mum about a great many things, at least for me.

Then came the army, and there is no questions about zoning your emotions out of this one. Ideally, I feel, the government would like an army consisting of drones. The higher officials will be humans of course, because they'd want them to be controlling the drones. I mean, drones don't eat and they follow orders all the time, assuming that they do not eventually become self-aware. You don't want an army of human beings, because humans were never build to be good soldiers. I mean, some of us definitely are, but the rest of us are not exactly going to be keen on killing other human beings just because the people higher up are pissed off with the higher up people from that other country. The army wanted all the boys to be emotionless, they wanted us to be uniformed. That is why they wanted us to wear the same uniforms, they wanted us to march and run in cadence, and they wanted us to sing to the same damn army songs everyday. They wanted us to do everything in the exact same manner, and they also demanded the elites to kill chickens just to get that whole emotion thing out of the way. I was never the elite, but then I was sure conditioned to feel nothing about the swarms, the long hours, the sleepless nights and the screaming into your face. All of those, to manipulate you into a drone of skin and bones, to rid you of your emotions when you are in need of that emotional release.

So yeah, well I think not a lot of things in life really gets to me. I think death gets to me, but most of the time it is filled with wonderment and confusion, and maybe an element of shock too. More than the idea of death, though, it is the idea of departure that scares me the most. It isn't so much about my own death, but more about the idea that I will never see a certain bunch of people in my life ever again. I think that departure is a scary thing, and it is one of those things that gets me down, even now. As you know, I am leaving for Buffalo in less than a month, and there are a great many things that I have to deal with emotionally, and things that are making it hard to leave this place behind. I am departing, and the emotional baggage that comes along with that concept is both daunting and overwhelming. But we all have to deal with it, and I am just glad that none of this is permanent, that it is only for a short period of time. At any rate, we are all learning to deal with this, and like all the crying that came out of my childhood, some good will come out of this hurt - I promise. Some good will come out of this ordeal, and we will all end up being better than who we started out as. There are times when emotional control isn't necessary, especially when the occasion is appropriate and fitting. I cry at times at the thought of leaving this place, I smile at times when I think about coming back to my beloved one. I laugh when somebody says something funny, and I feel contented when I think about how much I am being loved by everybody around me. In truth, emotions don't need to be a bad thing. An outpour of it does not need to be cringeworthy either. I love each and every single one of you, a statement from me for example. When speaking the truth, emotional control can go out of the window for all that I care.