in so many ways you find more missing everyday

it's 2am on saturday night, on a weekend where i have a HUMA paper to write and a 3 hour rehearsal to go to. and not that much time left to do both. somehow among all the things around me, i find that i haven't really changed. and i'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not.

i've been thinking a lot about what defines us. is it what we do? then i must be schizophrenic, because none of my subjects are even remotely related and i'm involved in a load of other stuff to boot. i sometimes admire people who seem to have it all together, who know what exactly they are good at and what they want out of life. but there is also something very sad about these people. there are so many different things out there that seek to determine what we are, so much so that i feel as if we don't ever really have a need to do so ourselves.

what else do we have then? what people tell us we are? that's probably worse. people always like to say how other people probably know them better than they know themselves, which i think comes from just not knowing yourself very well and letting others tell you who you are. that previous sentence was obviously too convoluted. but to the point. which i forgot. so in sum, no, i don't think we should be defined by what other people see us at, because it is such a negative way of seeing yourself, as if you are an inadequate judge of what comes from within you.

and i've lost the point of this entry somewhere along the line. maybe cos i just felt like i should post something here, as if i felt obliged to the 3 people who read this. i always say 3, knowing full well that more than 3 people will eventually read it. which reminds me how my blog got linked to by a very unexpected blog, because i didn't think i was a friend of said blogger.

which brings me to a point about friends. with all the facebook nonsense and blogs and IM and all the other things, it's just too easy to be "friends" with someone. and i suppose i'm back to my main point, because people are really well defined by the friends they keep. real friends i mean, and that's something no one else would ever know about you. i think that's really the essence of it. it's so hard to be objective about yourself. it's an oxymoron almost. so what do we have besides measuring ourselves against someone else? and if you take the aggregate of all the friends we can relate with (our true friends perhaps), you'll get something that would come close to describing who you are. everything else is just random tricks of the mind.

and now i'm feeling sleepy. which signals that i should stop blogging. but not before this: in my life i've made friends and lost them, and i suppose those are the signs of my growth as a person. some friends have stuck with me for a long time, like the parts of my personality that never changed. some new ones i've acquired as i become someone new. but at the end of the day, it's those friends you lose that also make a difference. i realise that with the people i don't talk to anymore, the friends i've lost, looking back just made me realise the kind of mistakes i've made about myself, about what tried to do but couldn't. and i see around me friends i've made who i know i will eventually lose. because this is just a phase, and it will be over soon.

so how much of this has been a conscience choice, and how much has it been a function of things around me i don't know. what i do know is that i'm not the only one making and losing friends, which means that at the end of the day, i'm defining someone else's life too. and as my MSN ignore list grows bigger, i realise that everyone has been part of this whole huge web we all have to work through to get somewhere close to where we are.