Chapter Thirteen: The Pursuit of Happiness (~jinghan)

I have been tossing an turning trying to work out what topic to choose for my Knowledge, Learning and Culture essay... Maths? Teaching? But then an idea strikes me and I know that nothing else will be quite as good in comparison: Happiness.

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A great sadness wells up inside me, and pours forth in a flow of tears. They are not tears of anguish, wrung with painful words. They are tears like a bottled up ocean finally freed to pour forth and fill the world. And in its salty, warmth I curl up silent, exhausted and grateful.

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I've been holding my breath and it's finally the last day of uni before the Easter break and it all happens in one sentence no commas no time to take a breath no time to think I roll out of bed realise I've slept through my alarm rush out of the house without breakfast have a train cancelled get to uni vaguely on time spend three hours working on my informatics assignment with my group go to my lecture only a minute after it has started have coffee with my teacher because there were only four of us in class go to my tutorial with the same people write a birthday card while tramming to melbourne central read a book while training home throw on some party clothes drive to the dentist drive home drive to a party make conversation drive back with my friend in the car make sleep-over conversation into the night and I feel like there has not been a fullstop right until my friend leaves the next morning.

I find myself, quite suddenly, alone in the house filled with silence and the pale sunlight of a grey Easter day. For a few minutes I stand there not knowing what to do.

My room is an aftermath of my previous day, clothing thrown down without time to be hung up, doona tossed aside exactly as it had been the previous morning when I realised I had slept through my alarm, computer still on with the party address open on facebook. It is the room of someone who hasn't had a full stop for twenty four hours.

After the buzz and rush of busyness the silence feels unnatural. I plug my ipod into the speakers and play the shrek soundtrack. I put my coat on a hanger and hang it in my wardrobe. And slowly the world picks itself up and attempts to straighten itself. Order peeks around the corner as if trying to judge if it is safe to come back.

"I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?"

It's not the lyrics, but the throbbing emotion of the voice that suddenly strikes me. I try to sing along but the words fade in my throat and all the emotion that I've only half felt, that I've tripped over, dance around and skitted past in the busyness of the past few weeks suddenly surfaces. A great sadness wells up inside me, and pours forth in a flow of tears. They are not tears of anguish, wrung with painful words. They are tears like a bottled up ocean finally freed to pour forth and fill the world.

Everything hurts. Like the sort of hurt you feel when the sun suddenly streams into the room and into your eyes, leaving you with blinking and salty water. Like the sort of hurt you feel when the truth wells up in your chest and bubbles up in your throat and you can barely breath because of it.

It hurts because I know I'm struggling with maths. I barely want to admit it. It's the one thing I thought I could depend on to be on my side even if everything else was trying to trod me down. I feel betrayed. It hurts.

It hurts because I know I need to let go of the unrealistic expectations I have of how well I should do with my study. Because I have all the H1s of last year riding me like a black curse. I'm scared because I don't want to find out that if I'm not good at study I'm not good at anything. It hurts.

It hurts because I can't help feeling so bitterly jealous of my friends who are enjoying their subjects, breezing through or enjoying the work and the pace. With enough time to help me when I stumble and scramble to comprehend. I need their help but I hate it all at once. And it hurts.

It hurts because I need people to love me, but cannot always give them what they want in return. I break hearts. I'm scared to get too close now. It hurts.

It hurts because I've been here (emotionally here) before and I'm scared that each time it will get harder to pick myself up. You can distract yourself with happy things, but it doesn't solve anything and the feeling you can't work out will come back. And because I know that some time in the past I've felt happy and on top of everything, I can't help occationally thinking "What is wrong with me? What did I do wrong?" And I know that its a really awful thing to think, because you're taking the power away from yourself, but sometimes the thought sneaks in and punches all the air out of you. And it hurts.

It hurts because I'm scared that all the things that made me happy and that I was good at are being taken away from me, leaving me with nothing.

My friend listens patiently. "Jinghan, you are a teacher. And one of the most wonderful people I've ever met. As a teacher, you don't need to have really good marks, you just need to understand what you're teaching and to be a good communicator. And I think you'll do fine at that," says my friend whose heart I broke, whom is better at maths than me, whom does so much more with his life without getting half as stressed, whom I am desperately jealous of, who helps me with maths, whom I can't help hating for being better than me at maths, whose friendship I want, to whom I can't give what he wants.

And all I can say is "thankyou... thankyou for saying that..."

"I think the net effect has been positive. Even though I might have wanted things to be different, I have grown a lot through it all. So don't for one moment believe that those things you are good at are bad just because they can hurt people. Because they also enrich people at least as much."

"Thankyou..."

And in the salty, warmth I curl up silent, exhausted and grateful.

And the hurt subsides.

Chapter Twelve: A Day Worth Living (~jinghan)

"Arg its so early..." I groan squinting at the light and rubbing at my eyes groggily. My sister turns to me with a unamused look. I like to tease her on Thursday mornings - the only morning when I wake up early enough to run into her in the morning. For her this is a luxuriously late start, since mum drives her to school on Thursday.

Some Thursdays I really mean it when I stumble half asleep and grumpy into the bathroom to toss cold water on my face. But I don't think I mean it this morning. There a faint warmth and sweetness wafting in from the window that hints at this being a good day.

My 9am tutorial turns out to be a good one. My tutor for informatics is allocated this one lecture. In tutorials he ambles through discussion sometimes at a painfully slow rate. However his lecturing method is slow and stead and really easy to comprehend.

As I leave the lecture, my mind is on the two assignments I have due tomorrow. I managed to finish one last night and have just enough energy left to crawl under my doona, I'm just holding my breath until this next one is done and then I swear I will sleep for a week.

The Baillieu Library has been vastly abandoned since renovations blocked up it's main entrance. Some days its hardly worth it to crawl up to the third floor entrance only to have to head out of the maze as soon as you sit down to study. Today I make the effort and am rewarded by a nice quiet carrell in the corner of the second floor next the to tall windows. I take a moment to take in the peaceful long row of books that stretches incredibly far to the right; and the silent dance of people on the path below the window on the left. I gather my courage and bring out my assignment.

My wording is awkward, but I feel good knowing I've nutted out the main gist of all the questions by the time I leave the library. I take an apple out of my bag. This is the first time I've actually taken an apple to uni. Yesterday, I was beset by an apple craving and embarrassingly ran into my father while I was stealing into Coles to buy an apple before heading into the train station. But it was worth it. There's a satisfying crunch and a good sweet acidity to my apple.

"Everything under Creation is represented in the soil and in the stars."

We have a lecture by a professor in indigenous culture. He tells us about how aboriginal people pass on their knowledge and for the first time I am beginning to understand the depth and connection, the wisdom and respect of their view of the world. He tells us about an aboriginal man who speaks of how he must write down what is traditionally pass on orally because he understands that "learning must change". He speaks of how our modern way of life is full of freedom ad choices, but while having these we must also accept the anxieties and stresses they produce. While the traditional world has less lifestyle choices but at the same time have a peace from anxiety.

Normally on a Thursday, I hurry to the Union House microwaves to heat my lunch and hurry up to the second floor and eat my lunch hurriedly in the corner of the practice room before snatching up some music and joining in mid-bar. But in light of the assignments weighing on my mind, I decide that today I should find a quiet patch of grass and just watch the sky or absorb myself in a book.

My lunchtime does not go exactly according to plan, I run into some friends. I thought myself too tired for idle chatter, but as I lie in the grass, we talk about memory the sort of detail we each remember and we talk about how you can see so much by just considering someone's body language. It's a real conversation. And I watch the clouds weave between the branches overhead as we talk in the shade of the tree.

Our tutor pleasantly surprises us by taking us out to Lygon street during our tutorial. "I want you to really look around you, tell me what you see." Imagine this: a gaggle of university students with bulging bags slung over their shoulders, talking to each other and wandering almost aimlessly between the curb-side cafe tables and the shops. We we supposed to be considering what cultural images we take for granted, what we zone out on because they're just "normal" and why someone else might see this differently... but it wasn't very successful (if you don't mind my saying) because we were all just so grateful and bewildered by leaving the rigid classroom tension.

The air is a soft comfortable warm as I head back towards uni. You'd have to be awfully bitter and downtrodden to be in a bad mood on such a day, I tell myself. I notice all the shops that other people in my class saw on the way down the street but I had overlooked. I notice the beggar they saw. "How is your day?" "Aw.. look it's okay, some of my stuff got burnt in a fire not long ago," he tells me. I press a dollar coin into his hand. "I hope things get better for you."

It's almost by chance (or perhaps I subconsciously understood what I really wanted) when I wander past the tall benches with their slanted modern stools behind the Asia-Myer Center. I've often seen people studying out here in the open air, but had always preferred the orthodox hush of a nice library. But today, the air, the sky and the light just invited me most obligingly to take a seat outside and study - how could I refuse?

I spend some time frowning over my answers for questions, scrutinising them, but by the time I put everything back into my bag I'm happy with my effort. I take a detour to a photocopier, the assignment submission boxes and then head down Faraday Street to Thesherman's Bakery for dinner.

Thesherman's Bakery: bare brickwork, warm comforting smells, tempting sugary things, friendly big wooden tables - sometimes I wonder whether I come here more for the simple but hearty food or for the warm comforting atmosphere. I take my plate and settle on the bar-stool in the little nook in the corner, fork in one hand, book in the other.

My book drags me in. Jeffrey Lu -  ostracised, racially abused, Vietnamese and friend of the protagonist, Charlie - has by sheer chance been allowed to play for the school cricket team because one of the players went down with a dodgy appendix just before the big rivalry game against the neighbouring town. He's good at it. Really good. But they never let him on the team because they were too full of themselves. There's something heroic about the way he keeps his head high when the other boys jeer at him. My heart breaks when he misses a spectacular catch that would have won him respect. He picks himself up and gets on with it.

Meanwhile Charlie is sitting on the hill watching the game with Eliza Wishart. Beautiful, witty, dignified Eliza Wishart that Charlie has been willing himself to approach for half the book. I can't help but share the fluttering of his heart as he say's to him "Let's talk about something else. Make me laugh." and he says "Would you rather a hat made of spiders or have penises for fingers?" and thinks "As soon as I realise what I've said, I want to crawl out of my own body and thump myself to death." I share his relief when Eliza giggles in return.

Jeffrey is up for bat, and as he hits shot after short and the score gets tighter and tighter the silent resentful crowd start cheering for him, actually cheering! The team is four runs from a win as Jeffrey goes up for the last bat of the game. Eliza takes Charlies hand in hers and... and... and...

...and before I know it I've missed the tram stop. I bounce off into the warm night air and walk back a block. I wish I was as brave, strong willed, quietly wise or dignified as the characters in the book. But then again there's Charlie, the flawed narrator, he's scared of insects, he doesn't stand up to his own mother, he wills his father to be more of a role model but never says anything - and yet he's not a dull character. He's surrounded by all these strong people, you know that he's going somewhere, that there's still something more for him to discover in life. Maybe I'm the Charlie of my own story.

I revel in the peace of having the house to myself when I get home. (My family went out to dinner with guests, I excuse myself thinking that I would need all night to do my assignment.) The packet of desiccated coconut that I bought on monday sits fat and lonely on the bench-top slouching against the mug-rack. And I concede to it's pitiful condition. I bought it to make honey-oat fingers, after much procrastination I think tonight is the night.

I lug out the big box full of of flours, sugars, chocolate chips, sultanas and oats, with a sense of pride at the collection of simple ingredients. There's a delightful chatter as the oats pour out of the packet into the measuring cup. The brown sugar falls out in soft handfuls. I melt butter and stir in the glossy amber honey into the golden liquid.

As the warm sweet smell of baking wafts from the oven I take a feijoa from a bowl of them someone has left on the bench. There's been evidence that someone has already eaten some. The green fruit fits neatly in your fist, and is the shape of a rugby ball. They grow in our backyard on odd years and fall to the ground when they are ripe. I cut it into quarters and bit into the tangy sweet grainy flesh. I haven't had one for at least a couple of years. I don't remember them to be this good. The next piece I lick out the sweeter jelly clear centre with it's crunchy seeds that surprise you, and then gnaw my way to the more tangy flesh near the husk.

I steal a chunk of honey-oat finger after I take them out of the oven and almost burn my tongue for my impatience. But it's good: hot, buttery, sticky and sweet.

It's been an interesting day. I'm still left wondering why I'm tired by 8:30pm when I used to sleep at 11:30pm and wake at 7:30am no problems. But a day full of good food, good talk, good reading, comforting places, simple accomplishments and sensual delights is a day well worth living.