I Am Stephen Dedalus (06-02-2008)

(Caveat: The writing in this entry is utter shit, but I'm tired of looking at the old entry...)

The first time I ever read James Joyce was in senior year of high school for my AP Language and Composition class. Because Ulysses was deemed too inappropriate by the puritanical school board, we were reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. By the end of the first page Joyce had used the word 'moocow' and discussed the transient temperature of urine. I liked it already.

My senior year of high school was not particularly stereotypical. Unlike the vast majority of my peers who had a blast partying their remaining days away with close friends before the exodus to various universities, I spent the year enslaved by my own naivety. For the first time since puberty I looked normal, which consequently resulted in my first girlfriend, the antithetical paragon of myself.

She had beautiful dark skin and luscious lips. She was a great kisser, but her kisses were bitter like the kind that can only be sweetened with copious amounts of cheap wine and cigarettes. Unfortunately I did not realize this at the time and spent the fourteen months of our relationship alienating my close friends and family in a nihilistic attempt to be what she wanted. I went from being a happy sheltered conservative nerd to being a dishonest angry liberal stoner. It is not a time I particularly care to reflect upon.

Fortunately my perfidious twin brother convinced me to attend UCI, and it is here that I came into my own - to be painfully cliché. Like Joyce's Stephen Dedalus I left my native home and ventured to a place where I was free to be what I wanted, or at least what I thought I wanted.

It is only in the last year, however, that I have truly embraced my passions and become who I am. Unfortunately my life seems to be an archetype for bad timing, and everything is going to change just when I have come to thoroughly enjoy my current circumstances.

In less than two weeks, I am leaving behind all of my closest friends, whom I love dearly, and Southern California, where I've lived almost my entire life, and moving to Salt Lake City for a year before attending graduate school. In order to avoid moving home with my über conservative Mormon family for that time, I'm moving to the Mormon capital of the world. Irony's a funny little bitch.

Like any ending, this one is bittersweet. I have only recently met many wonderful people, the majority of whom I will probably never talk to again after I move. I guess that's life though, full of it's own comings and goings.